Over the past few months, I haven't had as much time to knit and craft as I would like, but last weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to create two pairs of flap mittens for a great cause.

Over the past eight months, a family member of mine has been battling breast cancer. As a single mom, this has come with plenty of struggles with her health, but also with making ends meet in the endless struggle against bills and finances - which should be the last thing on someone's mind when she is fighting for survival.

So, a cousin of hers came up with a phenomenal idea to throw her a pancake breakfast and silent auction. The breakfast itself was a total blast, and in preparation, I offered to make a couple donation items in my space time. These couple pairs of mittens were fun and easy to make in some of my standardized sizes.

As an a-typical set up for me, these were made standardized to a men's large and a women's medium size mittens. The biggest challenge I faced was understanding the standardization of sizes as opposed to my usual custom creations.

I've made pairs in plenty of custom sizes for different people, so it was interesting to let these two pairs go without a real sense of end-result fit. The biggest concession I made was to leave these as an open top mitten with a flap instead of knitting individual fingers. The logic was so these would fit with more hand sizes than my normal customized flap mittens.